AV and Minor Parties

Assuming FPTP continues, I’d have thought it entirely possible to see the LibDems out of Parliament two elections from now (or reduced to some kind of regional rump where, as DD said, people are stil voting for Lloyd George). Here’s the obvious path

Next election: The leftish voters they’ve previously attracted go to Labour (if they care about the outcome) or vote for the Greens (if they vote for the candidate they most prefer). The Lib Dems hold on to a few seats on the basis of tactical voting by conservatives, but in most parts of the country they are finished. Labour wins an outright majority, and the LibDem rump is marginalised in opposition

Election after that: The Cons go all out to capture the remaining Lib Dem seats, winning most of them, and handing the rest to Labour. In seats they don’t already hold, the LibDems are correctly regarded as fringe candidates with no chance, and therefore attract very few votes.

Maybe someone with a better understanding of British politics could give a more informed view.

So Daniel is on twitter. The Shorter Dsquared?

I find it interesting that the referendum is likely to lose. I can understand why the major parties are against it, by I find it hard to understand why the voters are against it. Do they think they are innumerate? Or do they think it is really like proportional voting and will result in indecisive elections? Why would people want less choice? Do they not like the chance of having a protest vote against both major parties as an option?

I can understand why the major parties are against it, by I find it hard to understand why the voters are against it.

There are two reasons:

(1) Conservative voters will vote against it because that’s what the Conservative Party wants them to do.

(2) The rest will vote against it because they’re stupid little tossers who think somehow it’s more important to piss on Nick Clegg than to actually try to improve the electoral process — however slightly — in their own lifetimes.

2) The rest will vote against it because they’re stupid little tossers who think somehow it’s more important to piss on Nick Clegg than to actually try to improve the electoral process — however slightly — in their own lifetimes.

with political skill and judgement like this on the Yes2AV side, it’s a wonder why the cause isn’t more popular.

I find it hard to understand why the voters are against it. Do they think they are innumerate? Or do they think it is really like proportional voting and will result in indecisive elections?

Personally I’m against it because I know it’s not like PR. In fact AV is no more proportional than FPTP – and I don’t want to see the pressure for electoral reform defused by the implementation of some miserable little compromise.

As for screwing the Lib Dems, I see it more in terms of screwing the Coalition. Clegg would be able to sell a perceived victory on AV as a tangible justification for the coalition (never mind that Labour offered the same or more), which would stabilise his position & that of his party – and actually implementing AV in time for 2015 (which is possible) would almost certainly make a Lib Dem wipeout less likely, which in turn would make another Tory/Lib Dem coalition more achievable. No AV and there’s mutiny in the ranks while a wipeout looms for the Lib Dems – and Cameron and Osborne are looking smugger than ever. I’d say that spells trouble for the Coalition.

The trouble with AV is that the Lib Dems are still lots of people’s second choice, in some senses. I mean, if the question was “Rank these parties in order of decreasing support and/or increasing detestation” even I would vote Labour 1, Lib Dem 2, Tory 3. Of course, if the question was “Which of these parties do you want your vote to actually count for?” I’d vote Labour 1 and leave it at that – but in the privacy of the polling booth I’m sure lots of people will think they’re being asked the first question. And this is a problem in representational terms, not just because I don’t like the Lib Dems specifically – it means that parties whose programmes are blandly moderate, cynically opportunistic or both are likely to be systematically over-represented.

As for the Greens, under FPTP in the UK they’ve got ~0.1% of the seats (1 seat) on 1% of the national vote. In Australia they’ve got ~0.7% of the seats (1 seat) on nearly 12% of the national vote – and the record of third parties running independently in Australia isn’t exactly great.

One obvious answer is that as long as the Liberal Democrats are polling 10% the voting system won’t make a lot of difference.

Insert obligatory notice that even on 22% of the vote, they’re under 10% of the seats in the Commons at present. If AV were to yield a more proportional outcome, the Lib Dems could poll lower overall with little change in their representation. Of course, AV would not yield such an outcome, which is precisely why it’s the only reform the Tories would have consented to a referendum on, even under the threat of failing to reach a coalition agreement.

That aside, if we accept the premise of the OP that the Greens might eat into Lib Dem support under AV, the real question is whether or not the Greens do so sufficiently to overtake the Lib Dems in share of first preference votes within certain Parliamentary constituencies. If Green voters (as per the OP) vote 1. Green 2. Lib Dem 3. Labour, then it doesn’t matter if the Greens take 8% of first prefs so long as the Lib Dems get 9% – the Green votes then get redistributed to the Lib Dem and the Greens have done no harm to the Lib Dem position at all. It might even work out well for the Lib Dems, allowing disaffected supporters to ‘rebuke’ the party by ranking it merely second to the Greens. This only becomes a problem for the Lib Dems if the Green bandwagon accelerates past them – not an unlikely scenario in some seats (Norwich South?) but probably not likely elsewhere. In the practical reality of a 2015 election, the Lib Dem incumbency effect (which is historically unusually strong) would probably be enough to keep the LDs ahead of the Greens in first preference votes in Lib Dem-held seats, and there are plenty of seats where the Lib Dems have been campaigning for decades and the Greens have no real infrastructure.

Re John @2: I think the likelihood of your scenario depends on what happens to the bigger political picture in the UK. Labour hasn’t undergone any meaningful shift to the left yet, and haven’t made much of a grab for the Lib Dems’ civil libertarian base. The Tories still don’t love the Cameron project, and if he can only deliver them a single term of government, and coalition government at that, there will be plenty on the Tory right who will see this as evidence of liberal corruption of Tory values and they will want to institute firmer right-wing policies. The presence of Lib Dems in the government is making it very hard for the Tories to adopt populist authoritarian policies of the kind that Tony Blair increasingly came to rely on to keep “middle England” on-side. It doesn’t seem unlikely that Labour will exploit this gap themselves, pointing to their own “tough on crime” record from 1997-2010, possibly calling for a second stab at ID cards and extended detention without charge. A scenario in which Labour and the Tories duke it out over who can be “toughest” would be a positive development for the Lib Dems, who could expect to hang on to their core support and even win over some Tory exiles fleeing the collapse of Cameronism. My point is not that this scenario is particularly likely, but it’s far from obviously impossible. A reversion to mostly two-party politics is not particularly likely until Labour meaningfully reconnects with the left, thereby uniting the forces of conservatism in opposition to them.

I also idly wonder why, if people like NomadUK think that the British electorate are such appaling idiots, he wants them to have more of a say in determining the government.

It seems to me that the AV system itself is highly unattractive, that all the possible benefits which might accrue as a result of it are really quite speculative and far-future things, with very considerable potential to go wrong (after all, the implementation of AV in Australia 93 years ago does not seem to have generated much momentum toward a more proportional system).

The benefit of destroying Nick Clegg’s political career, however, seems reasonably immediate and certain, and the possibility of putting an end to the Liberal Democrats as a party looks achievable enough to be worth a try. I don’t actually think it’s necessarily irrational at all to vote No out of Clegg-hate.

I’ve been saying for a while that if we get AV (and I’m not hopeful) we may well see a realignment to four or five parties: a rightwing UKIP oriented kind of party; a right to middle Conservative party; something in the middle that hugs trees; something in the middle to left that is very oriented to fiscal issues; and possibly a stronger far left, but that I doubt.

On the whole I think this is a middling-left country with a rightwing hard core, but almost no left wing hard core. This could be a problem when looking for allegiances.

the possibility of putting an end to the Liberal Democrats as a party looks achievable enough to be worth a try

I’ll meet you at the crossroads. You bring the stake.

No, we’ll never get rid of the Lib Dems, and we’d probably miss them if we did. The possibility of putting an end to the Orange Book centre-right Lib Dems, on the other hand…

Ever since the Liberal revival they’ve been trading on the image of equidistance between the two main parties, which was basically a philosophical cover for rampant opportunism. That was going to be put to the test on the national level sooner or later, forfeiting some of the base in the process. What’s bizarre about the party’s current position is that Ashdown, Kennedy and even Campbell quietly leant much more towards Labour, and even the left of Labour. It’s looking like quite a good strategy right now, and will look even better the worse Clegg fares. Admittedly, “After this they’ll have to move to the Left!” is probably the most regularly falsified prediction in British politics, but still – it’s hard to see any kind of medium-term future for the Lib Dems that isn’t on the Left.

The benefit of destroying Nick Clegg’s political career, however, seems reasonably immediate and certain, and the possibility of putting an end to the Liberal Democrats as a party looks achievable enough to be worth a try.

Destroying Nick Clegg’s career is definitely achievable; the Lib Dems have a party structure that makes deposing their leader relatively easy. But sending the Lib Dems into the next election with someone other than the country’s most despised politician at their head might work against your second aim.

I think a yes vote is at least as likely to destablise the coalition, through the medium of driving the Tory right insane; a narrow yes vote on a small turnout would be especially fun from this perspective.

I also don’t really agree with the argument here:

With AV, the Greens could easily get 5-7% of the vote in a Commons election. And once they get 5-7% of the vote in a Commons election, they might attract more voters, especially voters who are less sympathetic to fringe parties.

Since AV isn’t a proportional system, the Greens could quite easily get 5-7% of the vote and either 1 or 0 seats. I don’t think the bandwagon effect will work all that well if percentage support doesn’t turn into representation.

“But sending the Lib Dems into the next election with someone other than the country’s most despised politician at their head might work against your second aim.”

Is there an example of a single party (across the Western world) that has gone ‘Orange Book/Nu Labour’ and then recovered?

I don’t know that much about UKIP, but Googling UKIP+Immigration produced

UKIP wants to freeze all immigration for five years to allow Britain’s infrastructure to recover before introducing an Australian-style points-based visa system. The full immigration policy, including details on how UKIP intends to triple the number of borders agency staff and deport all illegal immigrants

which sounds pretty close to One Nation.
http://www.ukip.org/content/latest-news/1603-ukips-common-sense-immigration-policy

And again, while I’m not entirely clear, the support base of UKIP looks to me to be fairly similar to that of One Nation – largely middle-aged and older, more likely to be male, economically under pressure, unhappy with change in general, and generally racist but in a Daily Mail, anti-political-correctness-gone-made kind of way, rather than the kind of violent racism that I see in the BNP and corresponding groups in Oz.

Feel free to set me straight.

@32 – that sounds about right. UKIP has links with the “True Finns” who did well in the most recent Finnish elections, and they sometimes talk about being a British version of the Tea Party. I suspect they’d get on well with Tony Abbott.

Further to Alex’s #33, I would very much surmise that if it turned out to be the case that AV benefited the Liberal Democrats and cemented them as a permanent party of coalition government, they might very well decide that it wasn’t such a miserable little compromise any more, and “momentum” for a truly proportional system could dissipate quite quickly. The more I think about this, the more I think that “You cannot trust the Liberal Democrats” is the defining issue in this referendum.

The problem here is the assumption that there is something called “off the table” that is predictively useful.

A fair point. My reasoning is that it’s unlikely the existing minority parties have enough support in any one constituency to win seats under AV – at least in the next 10-15 years. And, as dsquared says, it takes actual seats to win electoral credibility. Lib-Dem gains might offset that but it’s going to take time for them to rebuild their credibility – and I’m not sure they’d keep pushing for PR if they started doing well under AV.

So I’m thinking AV could turn out to be a purely cosmetic change, at least in the short to medium term. I’m going to vote “Yes” anyway because I think any reasonable change is worth a try and I don’t expect AV to be any worse than what we’ve got now, but I’m not finding a lot of reasons to care deeply about the result.

A Lab/Lib pact would also have needed to feature Plaid Cymru and the SNP voting with the coalition on England-only issues to command a majority against the Tories in England. Anyone who thinks that one would’ve been tenable is welcome to explain how it’d work…

Confidence and supply, ocker.

How doesn’t it work? News: the West Lothian question doesn’t exist! It doesn’t have any legal force; there is no requirement to have a majority of English MPs. (Think of it the other way around – nobody thinks the central government must have a majority of Scottish MPs to be legitimate.)

The Tories would whine, I agree. But that’s not actually an argument.

Anyone who thinks that one would’ve been tenable is welcome to explain how it’d work…

All you would have had to have done was simply to make sure you didn’t accidentally pass a statute or process rule which prevented Welsh and Scottish MPs from voting on England-only matters?

Sorry, should’ve added “whilst expecting Labour or the LDs to ever have any chance of winning anything in England again, and without the Tories getting in (and immediately passing every kind of English Democrat-style legislation to stop the same thing ever happening again) when the whole thing finally collapsed”.

Even if you think it’d’ve made the LDs less unpopular than they currently are and so kept them onside, I don’t see the incentive for the nationalist parties to prop up a government that only exists because the UK exists in the current constitutional format that they want to abolish.

Phil: On the other hand, the Greens do have the balance of power in the Senate, which is elected by PR. I suppose the question is then “do you think the House of Lords will survive, or be replaced in the foreseeable future by some kind of proportionally elected system?”. For my money, “abolishing the LibDems” doesn’t strike me as the most likely way to achieve “House of Lords replaced by PR”, but again your mileage may vary.

Farah – Australia has had an effective two-party system ever since adopting AV. Why, or more specifically how, would AV promote new party formation in the UK?

That depends on whether you believe the growth of the Greens in Oz is the product of people being able to vote for a smaller party without risking throwing the seat to their least preferred major party (the lesser of two evils thang). Australia is not much of a pristine experiment for this notion as we have an elected upper house with multi-member constituencies (i.e. the states) where candidates are elected by PR. The Greens first entered the Federal Parliament in the Senate.

But then of course Australia does not actually have AV voting (except in the state elections in NSW and Queensland – weird neither Brian nor John has pointed that out). Federal elections and those in other states are by preferential voting where ranking all candidates is compulsory. Thus the two major parties can pretty much ensure that so-called “protest votes” will eventually return to one of them. That said, the current Green MHR (lower house MP) and the independent Mr Wilkie owe their election to preferential voting plus the weird decision of a large number of “Tory” voters to rank them higher than the other major party. In normal circumstances this would have been a strategic vote that may have helped deny the other “party of government” a seat, and enough seats for government, but under the bizarre circumstances of the last election’s results these voters actually achieved a situation where the minority Labor government may need to curry favour with two individuals in most respects further (i.e. actually) to the left. Wilkie and the Green fellow would have lost under AV, as Tory voters would simply have stopped ranking after picking their preferred major party. (They are also unlikely to win at the next election, when the results of the last will persuade Tory voters they really do prefer Tory-Lite to the Greens or a passionate anti-imperialist like the Member for Denison.)

If y’all are intending to knock down AV because you’re concerned it will stymie future moves to PR, then fair enough, even if AV is truistically more democratic than Simple Plurality (or First Past the Post, or, as I like to call it, Biggest Tribe Wins). I say this despite believing that those who think the political establishment of Britain will ever countenance PR must be residents of the Ponyverse, but, heh, what do I know. It is a position that reminds me of those who argued against supporting the minimal Australian republic because it would stop us ever getting a real one – oh, wait, I was one of those people…

Confidence and supply, ocker.

Except nearly half the Labour PLP were firmly against coalition with the LDs in the first place, and went screaming to the media to denounce the idea as soon as it was raised.

I know, I know – Nick Clegg is still history’s greatest monster for governing with the Tories, introducing a University fees system that is slightly more progressive than the status quo ante and putting the brakes on Lansley’s NHS reforms.

introducing a University fees system that is slightly more progressive than the status quo ante

Daragh, please give up on this talking point. It does more to erode your personal credibility than anything else. Seriously. Stop saying it, and ask whoever gave you it to report for serious retraining.

Daragh, please give up on this talking point. It does more to erode your personal credibility than anything else. Seriously. Stop saying it, and ask whoever gave you it to report for serious retraining.

Sorry, how is providing government loans with extremely generous terms of repayment less progressive than the prior system? Indeed how is it functionally different to a graduate tax or any of the other fixes that Labour have come up with for a uni system that remains underfunded?

What, is it built on polders or something? News to me. Wales has existed since the days of Gerald of Wales, mate.

Axiomatically, no one with the power and resources to build a country the size of Wales would build one like Wales. It’s sort of a Blind Watchmaker argument – Wales, like the human retina and the vestigial feet of the boa constrictor, could not possibly be the result of an intelligent designer.

(sorry)

Axiomatically, no one with the power and resources to build a country the size of Wales would build one like Wales.

Well, they’d try and pick better neighbours, true.

a defence against your party having broken a specific promise

The promise was a Lib Dem government wouldn’t raise tuition fees. As part of a coalition that’s an issue they gave ground on in negotiations, along with many other issues because they did not win the election. Frankly having experienced both the Irish sytem (totally free at point of entry) and the UK system, and taken a look at the results of both I’m glad they did. ‘Free’ fees is, IMHO, not actually that good a policy.

And I’m frankly less concerned about the level of fees as I am about access. If a student pays £9K a year, but is guaranteed that money through a government loan with very generous terms of repayment I think that’s preferable than a student being asked to pay £3K per year but having to pass up the opportunity due to being unable to access funds. Now whether this increase in access compensates for the rather marginal potential decrease in ‘staying on’ rates due to the scrappage of EMA (about 6% according to the IFS) remains to be seen.

If a student pays £9K a year, but is guaranteed that money through a government loan with very generous terms of repayment I think that’s preferable than a student being asked to pay £3K per year

Please please please, take a job in finance. I need all the counterparties I can get.

Please please please, take a job in finance. I need all the counterparties I can get.

Might have been nice to include the last part – not everyone can get the £10K in credit required just for the fees in the private market Dan.

The promise was a Lib Dem government wouldn’t raise tuition fees.

No. It. Wasn’t.

“We will resist – vote against, campaign against – any lifting of that cap.”

Plenty more where that came from. Google “nick clegg promise”, it won’t take long.

No. It. Wasn’t.

Apologies – I hadn’t seen that. And its a fair cop – my interpretation from the campaign had been as I explained above. I still don’t think its the most important broken promise in the long history of broken political promises, but it is a broken promise none the less.

the suggestion that northeastern England, which is much more connected than Wales in nearly all respects, would not have gained any additional cultural identity or push towards further autonomy if it had its own government.

I didn’t make that suggestion. I agree that quite a few good things might happen if you could magic a north-eastern regional tier of government into being. Ask the people if they want one, though, and most of them are going to tell you to clear off. This is the point I was making – Wales has a functioning tier of sub-national government now because it already had an identity before it had one.

I agree, having a referendum on it was a daft idea. Unless you start off as Switzerland, he answer to “would it be a good idea to have a referendum?” is generally “no”. The AV one – a fairly minor change in voting practices that didn’t involve a referendum in the other places where it was introduced – is a good example, and also an example of why Clegg is either an out-of-depth idiot or (pace B&T) something worse.

But “Wales” in the days of Gerald was an English construction that meant “the bits of Great Britain south of Scotland that we haven’t conquered” (the ‘Anglo-Saxon word for foreigner’ etymology is pretty clear and accepted)”

Rather falls apart on the rock of the fact that “Cymru” is a Welsh word meaning “Us, Friends, Community”, and “Cymru” is the root of “Cambria”, the Roman name for Wales before the Saxons even arrived.

Cymru derives from the Brythonic Celtic word for “us / countrymen”, which was used across the south of the island of Great Britain as well as in before the Romans arrived (I had to look up Brythonic, but I knew Brittany and southern GB shared a linguistic community, whence their names are derived, and yer premier online reference source – and more importantly, its actual references – support the view that they all used something like ‘combrogi’ to mean “countrymen”). So Cymraeg = “us lot as opposed to those Roman/Saxon bastards”, in the same way that Welsh = “that lot, as opposed to us Saxons”.

It’s not clear from any of the texts why the Romans specifically chose to call what-is-now-Wales ‘Cambria’, but I’d guess it’s much the same reason why the Saxons called it Wales (ie “the places where that lot are still quite fervent and not very subjugated).

“Large linguistic community is beaten back into small pockets of not-very-accessible-to-each-other-land, develops independently, is annexed by aggressive major power, and many hundreds of years later creates a modern national identity based on the concept of the much larger community that used to exist” isn’t in any sense a bad thing. I’m citing it as a good thing. But you don’t need to claim, against any particular evidence, that Wales existed as a distinct place from the rest of Britain in the days when it were all Celts round here, to accept the concept of Wales as a modern nation based on a shared cultural heritage from them days.

Or was he was a Welsh nationalist, who believed the so-called “mountains” were an English conspiracy to keep the North and South apart?

83: It might have been all mountains everywhere, but Wales was certainly (and correctly in my opinion) singled out.

The mountains look on Cardigan, and Cardigan looks on the sea,
And I look down on the English, and the Welsh look down on me.

many hundreds of years later creates a modern national identity based on the concept of the much larger community that used to exist

This is Neil Kinnock’s view of Welsh history circa the 1979 referendum debate and it really doesn’t stand up; particularly you have to kind of skate over the Glyndwr rebellion.

“They got a large boost in this when they opposed military intervention in Iraq, something that both major parties supported.”
That’s not true; the Australian Labor Party did not support military intervention in Iraq.
Read this:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/18/1047749757036.html

Phil, it will make UKIP more influential than they are now because that’s what British society wants. Speaking democratically, that’s a good thing. Britain faces a simple choice – if you don’t want UKIP, rort the voting system.

Also, if you introduce AV without compulsory voting, well that’s just madness. And holding your election on Tuesdays? Fucking stupid. Not just because working people can’t vote, but because it sends a simple message to the working class: we’re trying to keep you out.

Hold it on Saturday, make everyone come, and give them a genuine choice. This is what we in the antipodes call “civilization.”

go on dsquared, you can do it.

Defend your weird northern practice of holding non-compulsory voting on a weekday. Give it a whole post. It’ll rank up there with your Budweiser post. Only it’ll be a lot flakier.

Face it, the antipodes do democracy and rugby better than you lot.

Well, if you don’t think second preferences from people with small-party first preferences ought to be considered as important as first preferences for a major party, then of course you’re going to be led to the conclusion that FPTP is optimal.

Comprehension fail – the comment you’re quoting ends with me saying I’m in favour of PR. I’m not saying that simple plurality voting is a good system; I’m saying that AV is even worse. Specifically, my comment argues that the one identifiable superiority of AV over simple plurality voting (it gives representation to an unrepresented fraction of the voters in each constituency, which may be as high as 1/6) comes at a price (it differentially empowers supporters of runner-up parties – in my scenario the runner-up party voters’ second preferences determine the result).

sg – I’m all in favour of UKIP being represented in proportion to their vote. That’s not what you’re describing; in fact you seem to be arguing that for a party like the DLP to have influence without representation is in some way superior to them simply having MPs.

Woe to any candidate whose name begins with Z.

Apparently the Australian system (to avoid what was apparently a genuine trend toward politics being dominated by A’s – no wonder David Aaronovitch is a supporter!) now randomises the name order on the ballots. So “woe unto one candidate in each constituency, selected at random”.

dsquared, I’ve lived in England. Until you lot can work out how to clean your beer taps and support a football team without a fight, you genuinely don’t have a clue. Also being able to build a railway station or run a train on time[<- something that seems to be lacking in the entire english speaking world], and knowing how to get to work in an inch of snow would be useful for that whole "civilization" thing. But for starters, if you could figure out how to change your government in a way that actually represented the will of your population, you'd be doing well. As it is, your government is barely representative of the population. And then you have Nick Clegg.

Just think about that for a moment. I’m sorry dsquared, but you can’t run around pretending to have some claim on the “c” word (well, not on “civilization” anyway – I’ll grant you other “c” words) while he’s hanging about, can you?

dsquared, I’ve lived in England

Ahhh, that must be where you heard about it.

Is it compulsory weak-ordering, or do you really have to spend time on ranking minority parties and independents you’ve never heard of?

it differentially empowers supporters of runner-up parties – in my scenario the runner-up party voters’ second preferences determine the result

This is only true because you arranged the first preferences to be indecisive, and you designed the alternative scenarios to differ *only* in second-place preferences. An equal or larger shift in first-place preferences in the opposite direction would have overwhelmed the effect of second-place preferences, and an equal shift in the same direction would have made it irrelevant.

How is allowing minor-party first-supporters to build a majority where none exists in first preferences worse than disenfranchising them completely (unless they vote tactically) as FPTP does?

Under almost any voting system anyone is likely to propose, a party with an outright majority of first preferences wins. The argument is about what to do in the very common situation that no such party exists.

As for PR, it’s off-topic, isn’t it? The thread is about a referendum between AV and FPTP, and the comment you quoted was about a direct comparison between AV and FPTP. I’ll admit to overlooking your parenthetical, but I think my point that your dislike for AV is pretty much forced by your disregard for second preferences is still valid, even if FPTP isn’t actually your ideal system — since your ideal system is also one that disregards second preferences of voters.

The parties might take them into account in coalition building, but as Clegg demonstrated, they aren’t required to. Clegg, once seated, is no longer bound by his constitutents’ views on which major party is the lesser evil. Do you think that’s a good thing? It hardly seems as if it can be described as democratic.

Clegg, once seated, is no longer bound by his constitutents’ views on which major party is the lesser evil. Do you think that’s a good thing?

No. What reform do you have in mind?

Clegg, once seated, is no longer bound by his constitutents’ views on which major party is the lesser evil.

Sorry, but in a parliamentary democracy absolutely nobody, once seat as an MP is ‘bound’ by his constituents’ views on anything, at least assuming that said MP isn’t interested (or primarily interested) in re-election. A recall statute, or some variant of Ukraine’s effective prohibition on MPs leaving parties in the middle of parliaments is the only real way to fix that.

A simple example: suppose you have three candidates, the conservative, the moderate liberal, and the radical liberal. (Theoretically any part of the spectrum can split, but it seems that in practice liberals are more prone to it.) Voter preferences are as follows:

45% C, ML, RL
40% ML, RL, C
15% RL, ML, C

55% of voters want to keep the C out (or to look at it another way, 55% of voters prefer the ML), but if you don’t look at second preferences, he gets in. And does so while owing nothing to any group but his own (if the ML is elected on second-preference votes he has at least some incentive to throw some bones to the RL base, or even offer the RL candidate a cabinet post or the like).

This doesn’t just call for tactical voting — it calls for tactical candidacy. The ML’s supporters are going to be furious that the RL didn’t withdraw from the race and ask all his supporters to tactically vote ML to keep the C out (not to mention that the RL voters didn’t have the sense to do so on their own).

Non-tactical RL voters are securing their own worst outcome by voting honestly rather than tactically, but so is the RL candidate by appearing on the ballot at all. This is what I mean about being oversensitive to splitter parties; the fact that the RL voters prefer the RL first shouldn’t be allowed to obscure or devalue their preference for the ML over the C, given that those are the serious contenders.

This sequence of events, including the recriminations, has also played out in a large country with FPTP, and I don’t particularly care to see it do so again (although the prospects of averting it are remote, except by stepping hard on anything that even looks like a spoiler candidacy, which is a troubling phenomenon in its own right).

P.S. Under PR with these preferences, the most likely result is ML-RL coalition (provided of course that the RL isn’t considered toxic like the German ex-communist party or something), which is a pretty reasonable result and probably not too different in practice from allowing the ML to be elected on second preferences. I’m not saying PR is a bad system. But like I said, it seems off topic for the thread.

This is what we in the antipodes call “civilization.”

“Ah, Australia,” he said, pronouncing the word as though his mouth would have to be disinfected before he used it again.

The current UK election system is highly undemocratic and any rational person who is able to compare the number votes to seats has to agree with that. Proportional Representation, as it is practiced e.g. in Germany, assures much more democratic results, – just look them up. It shouldn’t matter which party benefits or not, democracy shouldn’t be a protection racket.

novakant – as soon as PR is on offer, I promise you I’ll vote in favour and encourage as many other people as possible to do so.

I had assumed the second example was Canada’s New Democrats – I hadn’t heard of the Australian Democrats. (Maybe the history is wrong about the New Democrats emerging from one of the major parties, but aren’t the Liberal Democrats older than Labour anyway? Weren’t they the party of John Stuart Mill and co?)

Woe to any candidate whose name begins with Z.

“Compulsory voting” doesn’t mean being forced to vote; it means being forced to show up at a polling station on election day and being handed a ballot paper. If you really have no opinion you can then drop it in the ballot box blank or enscribed with the expletive-laden curse of your choice. It’s illegal to tell people to vote informally (a stupid interpretation of a reasonably sensible law); it’s not illegal to actually vote informally. Secret ballot n’ all (another Australian invention).

That said, there are apparently a few people dumb enough to sequentially number their ballots even though they have no interest in actually voting. I’d be fascinated to get an insight into the minds of these idiots.

“i have been amazed by the lies told about australia’s voting system by the no to AV people.”
Specifically, we are told that in the rest of the world only Papua New Guinea and Australia have it, and Australians want to get rid of it. Assuming there are indeed some Aussies who want to get rid of AV, how many of those are clamouring for FPTP? Any Aussies here who can help with the facts on that?

But you got to admit, No2AV are bloody good at effective lie memes – snappy, memorable and spreading like wildfire. My favourite: they want to take away one man, one vote.

And this by the way answers the question on why the voters want to keep FPTP – they’ve been persuaded by an expert PR campaign that if you’re sick of the political establishment, you should want to keep FPTP. It’s brilliant, and only slightly less genius than erecting hollow stage scenery all over Wales to fool the Welsh into thinking they inhabit a mountain environment.

Speaking as a political tragic, I would say that exactly no Australians are demanding FPTP, and very few complain at all about the voting system. There is some grumbling about the fact that we all have to show up and vote, sometimes, but usually from conservative politicians who believe that they would do better if voter turnout was lower. A bigger issue is the undemocratic apportionment of Senate seats equally between states that are hugely variant in population, and that house works on modified PR (within each state). So, yes, you have been told lies. Lots of them.

I’ve never met an Australian who thought AV was a bad idea or wanted to get rid of the system we have. I think for every Australian I know who wants rid of compulsory voting, I know about a thousand who are proud of it and think other countries should adopt it.

In the fact, as regards the point about independents, that is another issue that hasn’t been discussed here. Mostly, this happens when the electorate is dominated by one party, but that party has internal divisions. If enough people dislike the official candidate, you get to pick another one. I get the feeling that AV in general tends to favour pragmatism over ideology – and that is one case where it often has that effect. Compared to FPTP, it gives more power to the voters and less to the major parties. On balance, that is surely a good thing.

Sam, maybe that’s because under AV it’s possible to vote according to your preference, with some expectation that your preference will be reflected in the final vote count (it’s not perfect, obviously, but it does give this effect sometimes). Whereas with FPTP you have to vote for the person you think will get in. e.g. all the people I know in the UK who say “I live in a safe [insert party here] seat so there’s no point voting.” if you look at the discussion of elections in Australia recently you’ll see a lot of debate has gone into predicting which safe labor/liberal seats will fall to the Greens. In fact, famously John Howard (the Prime Minister) lost his seat in 2007.

Where AV favours pragmatism is not in your judgment of who to vote for, but in the way parties have to appeal to a cross-section of the populace, cut deals with each other, and so on. E.g. in Australia, much attention is focussed at every election on just what the ALP (Labor) will offer the Greens “in exchange for their preferences.” Thus the Greens’ voters pragmatic intentions (to vote for their preferred party first, and deliver preferences to or against a major party) strongly influence non-Greens policy. But at no point in this process do Greens voters have to vote against their own preferred candidate (except in very rare, perverse situations).

Someone who did a Government class in High School, please correct me if I’m wrong about this…

The specific details vary, and the names Australians use for the different flavours vary, and none of them is exactly the same as the UK proposal. But they are all AV. Right?

All the Australian single-member electorate systems have what academics classify as AV, but there are in fact two variants: “compulsory preferential”, where voters must number every box, and “optional preferential”, where they can number as many boxes as they like (as is proposed in the UK). The former operates for the federal lower house and state lower houses in Victoria, Western Australia and South Australia. The latter operates only for the state lower houses of New South Wales and Queensland.

As others have pointed out much of the UK comment on the Australian system has been pretty bizarre (and I say this as someone who has spent much of the last 3 weeks in England and reading the newspapers). The idea that there is anything like a groundswell to make changes to the preferential voting system in Australia has no basis in fact – having said this, if you read the Murdoch press then there appear to be more people out there now saying that the conservatives (whom we mischievously name the Liberals) were robbed in the last election.

But also as others point out preferential voting is only part of the story – voting is compulsory in Australia and because we have therefore apparently fallen into the habit of voting (more than 90% of us do) – in Australia you have to get close to half of the vote of 90% of the population to become government. Whereas in the UK you can become government on say 40% of the 80% (or perhaps less) who turn out to vote. So for the Tories to become the government in the UK they only need about one third of the population to vote for them, while for the Tories to become government in Australia they need 45% to 50% of the population to vote for them.

So on the whole we have more reasonable Tories than the UK – although our current Tories are eagerly trying to disprove my thesis!

But we also have the complement of this – a more middle of the road Labor party – although the UK Labour party has apparently become more centrist under T Blair than even Australia did under Hawke and Keating.

But the crucial point is that preferential voting not only changes the incentives for voters, it changes the incentives for political parties.

Sam, maybe that’s because under AV it’s possible to vote according to your preference, with some expectation that your preference will be reflected in the final vote count… Whereas with FPTP you have to vote for the person you think will get in.

I’m not sure that’s very helpful if you support a minor party. In a Tory/Lib-Dem marginal seat under FPTP, I might want to vote Green but end up voting Lib-Dem to keep the Tories out. Under AV I could have Green as my first preference but I’d still have to vote Lib-Dem as second choice if I wanted to keep the Tories out. So the net result is tactical voting plus an exit poll about which party you really wanted to win. Which sounds depressingly like one of those “consultation exercises” local authorities have when everyone knows they’re going to build the shopping centre anyway.

Frequently when folks vote in a big U.S. election [FPTP] it’s because they passionately don’t want some particular candidate to win.^1^ Often enough it’s true that I would want to put much more weight in my “please oh god not this person” anti-vote than in my “I’d prefer this person” pro-vote.

If we (perhaps dangerously) assume that most folks in a voting population feel that way and vote tactically to optimize their anti-vote effect, which is the more reliable means for ensuring the least preferred candidate doesn’t win, FPTP or AV? (If I understand the system correctly, under typical PR it’s effectively impossible to anti-vote.)

I am asking in part because I think it’s a roundabout way to address D^2^’s question, if we assume that lots of folks want to screw over the LibDems.

tangentially — if the AV referendum returns the resounding “no” that everyone’s predicting, is there any chance the LibDems might respond by leaving the coalition and calling for a vote of no confidence on Cameron? I’m assuming this would be career-suicidal of them, but not entirely sure.

It would be, not tactical voting, but rather an accurate reflection of the fact that you prefer the Lib Dem to the Tory.

I think my point is that tactical voting would also be an accurate reflection of the fact that I preferred the Lib Dem to the Tory.

also what mollymooly said is important. In a list of 50 candidates I can put all the lefties in the top 10, then provided I put lib dem above tory I’m safe – so I can put lib dem at 49 if I want, and tory at 50.

Of course, you always end up with this dilemma: should I put the Shooter’s Party above the BNP? What about the Fishermen’s Rights party? And is “Say No To Islam Now” actually a front for the BNP? But they’re all down around 45-50, and you can tell how toxic they are by looking at the how-to-vote cards anyway. Or just vote “above the line” for the party you prefer, and assume they’ve figured out the preferences more effectively than you have.

the “institutionalization” you mention is a good thing

It seems to me to involve renouncing any possibility of the party you support ever forming part of the government, or the policies you support ever being any more than a bargaining counter.

Another way of looking at AV would be to say that plurality voting in single-member constituencies only really works if there are only two serious competitors, and the function of AV is to resolve multiple-party politics to this two-party norm. (Runoff voting was introduced in Australia with this explicit purpose, at least if I can trust Wikipedia.)

AV in Australia would be a lot more friendly to the left if it weren’t for the Coalition

True, and FPTP would be a lot better for the Left if it weren’t for the Lib Dems.

If a better voting system existed in the world, Britain would already have it, amirite?

Whose comments are you referring to? On the off-chance that it’s mine, I’ve said repeatedly that I’d like to see PR introduced – I just think AV is even worse than FPTP.

There are variations within Australia on this. (Takes deep breath). In NSW (lower house) and Queensland elections we have what is known here as Optional Preferential Voting where you can number however many squares you want to. In these elections, you don’t have to vote all the way down the ballot, you can stop any time after 1. Federally and in other states except Tasmania we have Preferential Voting, where for a lower house ballot to be valid, you must number every square. As Brian points out above, interpretations have varied as to whether ballots are informal if you miss one number but your intention is clear, and so on.
I won’t go into Upper house electoral systems in the states, Tasmanian elections, or Senate elections, because how long have you got? Anthony Green’s your man for that — a quite brilliant psephologist who knows everything, cited in comments above. For myself, I was permanently scarred by having to help count Hare-Clark elections for a student representative body a few years in a row. Absolute torture for an English literature student, but these are the things we do for politics.
One’s last preference never counts of course, and effectively usually the last few, really, because those candidates are either the winner, or eliminated before your vote is distributed that far. As for popular support — well, all Australian voters now don’t remember other systems, and that’s just the way you do it. Maybe we are particularly docile? Civil liberties don’t really fly as an argument, because you don’t actually have to vote, you only have to turn up and get your name marked off. If you don’t, they send you a letter asking you why you didn’t turn up, and if you give a reason that’s acceptable, such as advanced pregnancy, illness, travelling, working, they let you off. If you don’t have a reason you get fined a tiny amount, I think $20. If you don’t answer, they wipe you off the rolls and you have to go and re-enroll at your new address. It’s not onerous, and if it gets more than 90% turnout, it seems well worth it to most people.
I remember being taught that voting was a duty and a responsibility, and should be taken very seriously.

So the net result is tactical voting plus an exit poll about which party you really wanted to win.

In a sense, all voting is “tactical”. However, I think the useful definition here would be “voting other than in accord with your real preference”, which AV would indeed abolish. Referring to the primary vote total as “an exit poll about which party you really wanted to win” is actually not a bad way of putting it – but what’s wrong with that?

What’s the case for saying you must (literally must? is your ballot actually void if you don’t?) cast a preference for every single candidate down the very dregs (eg Official Monster Raving Loony @9 v breakaway Democratic Monster Raving Loony Party @10)????

None. “Optional preferential voting”, as proposed in the AV referendum, is a plainly superior system to the compulsory preferential one which mostly operates in Australia.

Referring to the primary vote total as “an exit poll about which party you really wanted to win” is actually not a bad way of putting it – but what’s wrong with that?

Nothing’s wrong with it at all – which is why I’m voting for AV – but it’s hardly an epochal change in the political landscape. More than anything else, I just resent being told that it’s a once in a generation chance to change the face of British politics by (mostly) supporters of the one party who might see a mild benefit.

I’d like to echo Strategist’s thanks to the Aussies, though. It’s been very helpful to hear from knowlegable people who aren’t part of the UK debate.

For the last time, no it hasn’t. We have had three major parties for decades. The National Party (agrarian socialists) would not still exist if not for preferential voting. The fact that they have been in permanent coalition with the Tories is not the fault of the voting system. We now have more than three parties, one of which is the Greens, which may indeed be in permanent coalition with Labor for some time, because who else would they possibly agree with? This will change things. It is already changing things. Because I can vote Green then Labor, I do. Without any fear of enabling the vile ‘Liberals’ (aka Tories). Or I can vote 1 Green, 2 Socialist Alliance, 3 Socialist Workers, 4 Random Reds, 5 No Airport Noise, 6 Labor and 7 ‘Liberal’. For the Win.
Labor knows this. There’s a reason our local Labor member, who is greatly in danger from the Greens, is the Greenest member of the party.

Emma – I specifically didn’t say “two-party contests”. Looking at election results since 1949, it seems very hard to argue that AV hasn’t entrenched two-way contests on a national scale – more so even than FPTP in Britain. On http://www.australianpolitics.com there’s a page listing “Two-party-preferred statistics for all federal elections since 1949” (“The two-party-preferred vote is the total number of votes received by the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the Coalition (Liberal & National Parties).”). I’d never even seen the phrase “two party preferred” until I started reading about Australian elections.

As for the current – and very welcome – rise of the Greens, you seem to be saying that the fact that the system has allowed it to happen should count in the system’s favour. But earthquakes happen in any system: preferential voting was initially intended to shut out the ALP, and look how that worked out. I’m saying that changes like the rise of the Greens can happen much, much sooner under a more representative system. In this case, it might even have happened sooner under FPTP, which does at least favour determined minorities with a geographical base. (As I think I said upthread, 0.15% of our MPs are Greens, on a national vote share of 1%; the corresponding figures for Australia are 0.67% and 12.7%. Their relative under-representation in Australia is nearly three times the UK level, in other words.)

They’re not interested in three-party politics; their ideal is to turn every constituency into a “two-horse race” (a phrase that appears in Lib Dem literature almost as often as those bar charts), one of them being the Lib Dems

Quite.

What I think he means, and what you should be bright enough to work out he might mean, is that they are seeking to change the electoral system very much in their favour while posing about as disinterested supporters of fairness and democracy. Not just that they seek to win more seats, but changing the system so that the both-sides-of-the-street approach itself produces richer rewards than now.

Not a hard distinction to see if you want to.

But that’s LibDemmery.

Ben, in Australia the conservative side of politics consists of the (conservative) Liberal Party and the (agrarian) National Party. When the latter emerged immediately after World War I, the resultant vote-splitting in rural constituencies damaged the anti-Labor forces electorally. The conservatives were in office at the time with majorities in both houses, so they changed the electoral system to suit themselves. All of which sits very well with your observations. It took a while coming, but the change eventually came back to bite them – the system has primarily been beneficial to Labor over the past three or four decades as the biggest minor parties have been of the left.

However, it should be noted that causation here runs in both directions. If the conservatives had not been able to introduce AV, the Liberals and Nationals probably would have merged. Indeed, they have done just that in Queensland, where the “weaker” optional preferential form of AV (introduced in 1991) means the Liberals and the Nationals damage their cause when they field candidates against each other – particularly since increasing numbers of voters in Queensland have adopted the “just vote one” option as they have slowly come to realise that the rules are different for state and federal elections.

Well, obviously national peculiarities and historical contingency can explain an awful lot – although, for what it’s worth, our Labour Party fought its first national election in 1906. But given the combination of
– AV’s tendency to favour no more than two parties in any one constituency
– FPTP’s marginally greater openness to third-party challenges
– the almost total dominance of Australia’s lower house by two parone party and one coalition
– the marginally better representation of third and fourth parties in the British House of Commons
and, not least,
– arguments advanced here in favour of a two-party representative duopoly, with smaller parties functioning as external fractions or pressure groups

I’m not seeing much that persuades me that AV would give Britain a more representative electoral system.

Most of those -s.

Phil, I think that statement at 172 puts too much blame on the electoral system and not enough weight on the particular cultural qualities of the countries. It’s always likely under any system that the UK will have more small parties than Australia, because of its national minorities, and AV doesn’t actually favour a two party system – a third party can form in Australia but will only succeed if it has a geographical base (as Emma observed) because of the single-member system. If, e.g., the Greens had a genuine geographical base in Tasmania they would have good representation in the national house of reps. Similarly if a radical industrial leftist party formed on a strong base in, say, Melbourne, this would happen.

For a good example of this see Pauline Hanson.

“pretend that you have reasons other than ‘I hate Nick Clegg’ for your otherwise unjustifiable political position”

Your engagement with opposing viewpoints is a lesson to us all, John.

But given the combination of – AV’s tendency to favour no more than two parties in any one constituency – FPTP’s marginally greater openness to third-party challenges

This is nonsense – the exact opposite is the case. The UK is not the best example for the effect of SP (with, as has been mentioned frequently, its regionally based nationalist parties); the best is the US where every vote for an emerging third party has to leap the hurdle of voters thinking they’ve cast an effective vote for the worse of two evils. (They can’t really rely any more on the state violence, outright fraud and rigged electoral systems that destroyed the Populist Party. SP and the thanksralphism that goes with it will have to do.) While Green representation in Oz is, as a practical matter, the direct product of PR in the Senate, their growing voter base is a product of preferential / AV voting for lower houses, where those intending to vote Green aren’t stymied by the prospect of objectively assisting the Tories win. This undoubtedly increases the Greens’ primary vote, with all the usual discourse benefits to say nothing of campaign financing, and also helps make the case for a move to the even better system of PR, for why should a party that gets 5 to 8% of the vote (the Nationals) be a partner in government due to the regional seats it wins while a party getting 8 to 12% of the vote like the Greens wins no seats at all. Without some variant of AV, quite a large percentage of those voting Green would choose to not do so for tactical reasons, making the Greens’ support base appear smaller than it is, giving it no ability to build on voter support for its policies, and inflating the false appearance of legitimacy of the regional representative system.

The UK is not the best example for the effect of SP (with, as has been mentioned frequently, its regionally based nationalist parties)

I’ve been thinking in terms of England – I’ve no idea how an AV-based election would play out in Scotland or Wales, although I’m confident that the result would be less representative than those of the PR systems already used for their sub-national elections. When I say ‘third and fourth parties’ I’m thinking of the Liberals, the SDP, the Lib Dems and the Greens – I should have spelt this out. And again, I’m not saying that SP is a good system; I’m saying that AV is even worse.

for why should a party that gets 5 to 8% of the vote (the Nationals) be a partner in government due to the regional seats it wins while a party getting 8 to 12% of the vote like the Greens wins no seats at all)

So AV’s good because it’s not representative and therefore makes the case for PR?

Leinad – any chance of reading my earlier comments on the thread?

Based on Australian experience, the strongest argument for AV is NOT that it tends to permit third parties to get parliamentary representation (I think it does a little, but single member systems are always going to make life unfairly hard for third parties that do not have a strong regional dimension). No, the strongest argument is that it forces the two dominant parties to pay attention to individual issues that concern third party voters, because those voters’ preferences now matter as they can be directed to the other party.

Emma’s post @162 is a practical demonstration of the effect – and a common one on both left and right in Australia (yes, AV would probably move the Tories rightwards on immigration, for instance).

So AV would not benefit the LDP all that much as a party, but it would ensure some of its concerns – eg civil liberties – get more influence within the dominant parties.

Yes Robert, I do think 2 complicates things for england. You can’t necessarily punish the party that took you to war (Blair) without voting in the party you think is going to destroy healthcare (Cameron). This is not a problem in Australia (as much). But even without federalism, if you have AV you can make clear your disapproval of the war, knowing your vote will not benefit the party of destroying healthcare.

I think some people on this thread, looking at Australia from afar (and bizarrely counting themselves lucky to be doing so, in ajay’s case) are really unaware of the extent to which preferences and pleasing minor party voters matter in Australian politics. possibly also people are unaware of the weight given to analysis of third- or fourth-party voting trends. There’s been continual debate about the cause of the collapse of the ALP’s primary vote and the growth of the Greens, and it’s largely taken as a signal that squibbing on climate change legislation was the cause.

It’s unlikely that climate change would even be an issue in Australia if it weren’t for the role of the Greens in national politics.

dd – So AV would not benefit the LDP all that much as a party

Oh yes it would – see my comment upthread (and google “Liberal Democrats two-horse race” for plentiful illustrations). AV imposes a duopoly in each individual seat: it’s ideal for eternal second-placers with a core of activists & an opportunistic appeal to both sides of the street. (This is one reason why I’m not making any bets as to how it would play out in Scotland or Wales.)

which AV will enable them to achieve for reasons not specified

I’d have a bit more patience with these lofty dismissals of my arguments if the people making them showed any sign of having read what I’ve written. As I’ve said more than once in this thread, I’m talking about the effect of counting previously unexpressed weakly-held preferences for runner-up parties with bland and/or opportunistic programmes.

There is no basis in fact or logic for asserting that AV will cause support for one of the three parties to wither away in seats where all three are currently competitive.

My argument is that, in a three- or four-way contest, a minority party with a consistent and distinctive programme has a much better chance of getting a plurality of first preferences than getting an overall majority by runoff voting. It’s a slim chance – which is why I support PR – but it’s still a better chance than that party would have under AV, which tends to favour a smaller number of contenders aggregating a wider range of preferences. Given that supporters of AV on this thread have not only acknowledged this but claimed it as a positive feature of the system, I’m at a loss to understand why you’re dismissing it so categorically.

While this is a thread that should have died a natural death some time ago, one cannot pass by the idea that the Greens have put human rights in Tibet on the Australian political agenda without bemusement, or indeed bewilderment.

Phil: first up, apologies for being unclear above. “I know you are, you said you are” was a playground formulation of “tu quoque”, based on your deliberate misrepresentation of both AV and the situation in Australia and complete ignoring of everything your opponents write, followed by accusing me of failing to engage with *my* opponents’ arguments. It wasn’t intended to accuse you of having explicitly stated things about your motivations that (although I’m fairly sure they’re true) you haven’t stated.

I’d have a bit more patience with these lofty dismissals of my arguments if the people making them showed any sign of having read what I’ve written.

…and the same continues to apply.

Best argument on the AV question: “good ideas do not need to have a lot of lies told about them to secure public acceptance”. The No to AV side has been telling a lot of lies. Therefore, vote Yes.

I’m not convinced either side has been lying outright

Nope, the No side has actually been lying outright – both by saying that AV would cost £250 million and by saying that British troops in Afghanistan are short of body armour and could be supplied with it if the money wasn’t spent on AV.

Or alternatively, anyone thinking of changing their minds now that an amazingly unpopular leader of a complacent and unprincipled political party with “Liberal” in its name has had his career finally and deservedly destroyed?

This was a self-inflicted wound by the Liberal Party. FPTP didn’t make Michael Ignatieff support the Iraq War, it didn’t make him lose his nerve in previous confidence votes, it didn’t force him to engineer an early and ill-timed election, and it didn’t even make him such an unappealing and wooden politician.

@dsquared – no one is disputing any of those things. But that’s not the point. The point is that 60% of Canadians voted for parites that under almost any reasonable definition are of the centre-left (some more centre than left, admittedly.) Less than 40% of Canadians voted for a party of the centre-Right (whose leadership is arguably more right than centre.) Under an IRV/AV system it is almost certain this would have resulted in a centre-left coalition. Under FPTP it resulted in a Tory majority – that is a result 60% of the people did not want. THAT’S what this debate is about, how the electoral system reflects the will of the people, not which ultimately transient political leader the destruction of whose career you’ve decided is the most pressing political priority this week.

As far as I can see, the “political will of the people” (“You think the Voice of the People is shouting ‘Hail Spode’!) involved fairly weak preferences about the national government (turnout was historically low), and fairly strong preferences about whether the NDP or Liberals ought to be the face of opposition from the Left. Since AV would have frustrated the second, I’m not sure at all that you’re right.

Personally, I’ve switched from No to Yes, having decided that fucking-up the Tories (also retrospectively re Thatcher) is more important to me than fucking-up Clegg.

But on the subsidiary issues covered in this thread:

1. Why was Daragh M allowed to get away with the claim that it was Clegg who torpedoed Lansley’s health changes? (a) because it isn’t clear they are sunk yet and (b) because the Libdem bases seem to have forced him into it.

2. Why was sg allowed to get away with (a) more of his ridiculous anglophobia and (b) specific claims concerning a drink (beer) which Australians can’t make properly.

“To your question – its frankly immaterial as to why Clegg torpedoed this”

Well no, it isn’t immaterial to the claims you were making about Clegg, namely that he’s less bad than we think he is.

the evidence, on balance, suggests that Nick Clegg is not history’s greatest monster

Daragh, can you get through one single comment without setting up a strawman? That’s not a question, it’s a suggestion. One step at a time.

@Chris – I was using the ‘history’s greatest monster’ in its internet meme form, in terms of the propensity of certain people to wildly overreact to and overemphasise the failings of certain political figures instead of trying to evaluate their actions in a reasonably coherent and rational fashion.

Likewise Chris, and while I will admit to being rather churlish here so have you, and I think objectively there has been a distinct cognitive bias on behalf of you and other commentators to the tune of ‘Nick Clegg is a bad person, therefore his actions are bad, thefore policies supported by him (such as AV) must also be bad.’ I find your analysis of many other topics to be very keen and incisive, but frankly there’s an element of knee-jerk tribalism when dealing with the coalition which is very, very common in British politics and which shuts down reasonable debate.

Anyway, we had already noticed something similar happening last May (there was a left-of-Tory majority vote in England, let alone Scotland and Wales).

Which, had the election been conducted under AV, would have led to a left-of-Tory coalition. Under FPTP, a left-of-Tory coalition would have had a minority of English seats, as above, so wouldn’t have been viable.

specific claims concerning a drink (beer) which Australians can’t make properly.

Mass-market counterexample: Coopers Pale. Better than anything you’ll find on draught in a non-specialist English pub, and far better than anything you’ll find on draught in a non-specialist US pub. Pure Blonde and Hahn Super Dry are acceptable mass-market German-style lagers. VB and Carlton are swill, of course.

I believe AV is an even worse electoral system than the one we’ve got at the moment, for reasons I’ve set out at a length which is starting to bore even me.

I apologise for calling bad faith earlier – it was uncalled for. But re-reading your arguments against AV (versus FPTP, I mean), I’m still a little baffled – apart from “because it helps the Lib Dems” (which you have actually stated, and which I’m struggling to see how it *isn’t* reducible to ‘because I don’t like Nick Clegg’), they seem to be based on an extremely contrived example of a case where strange and unlikely bad things could happen under AV but not FPTP (#65) and an somewhat contrived example of a case where strange and unlikely good things could happen under FPTP but not AV (#192).

Even if AV were actually no better or very slightly worse than FPTP (I don’t believe this), there are still strong reasons for someone in favour of electoral reform to support it:

1) the ‘no’ vote will be spun by the Tories and by the illiberal end of Labour as a ‘no’ to electoral reform, not a ‘no’ to AV (see: if the Welsh referendum had been lost in 1997); 2) as in Australia, the increased share of votes to minority parties will help them win seats in an elected upper house – which itself is far more likely if we get a ‘yes’ rather than a ‘no’ to electoral reform; 3) even on a sheer-partisan basis, the worst bastard in the UK government at the moment is David Cameron, he’s the only leader campaigning against AV, and he’ll take a ‘no’ as a personal victory.

(it’s also worth noting that if the *referendum* had been held under AV, “rank the following in order, FPTP, AV, STV, additional member”, we’d certainly be getting electoral reform at this point…)

Also, and sorry if I’m putting words into Phil’s mouth, AV doesn’t just help the LibDems, it helps them specifically in proportion to the extent to which they use the tactic “campaign left in some seats, campaign right in others, campaign opportunistically everywhere and then form as unprincipled a coalition as you like”. I don’t agree that you can add Labour and LD votes together and get a “left of centre” number in any straightforward way.

(It’s AV for cats)

And then it took the best part of 20 years to get another one.

Well, it had been rejected really quite comprehensively – have a look on Wikipedia at how bad the results really were for the Nashie cause. I think there would have been cause for complaint if someone had come back five years later for another go. You have more of a case with respect to the Scottish referendum, but this brings things rather into focus – it wasn’t that the anti-referendum camp had “spun” the 1979 result, it was because we had the unusual situation of 18 consecutive years of Conservative (and Unionist) government.

The point, anyway, was to say that going to AV from FPTP gives you a gain in representativeness of at most 17% (in absolute terms),

The maximum here is almost certainly a wild over-estimate – after all, as Matt Turner has pointed out once or twice, the LibDem voters would still have second preferences under a FPTP system, so around half of them would actually end up getting the result under FPTP that they actually “wanted” under AV.

SG – I think you could argue (from Canada) that one of the ADVANTAGES of FPTP is that it lets you make dramatic experiments (Harper, Thatcher and yes Wilson), that would never be tried under AV.

shouldn’t you be campaigning for compulsory voting,

You haven’t explained why this is a good thing, other than that it’s what you’re used to.

elections on the weekend,

Good idea.

and a democratically elected upper house

Excellent idea.

first

OK then. “No to AV – Yes to real democratic reform!” Works for me.

Given that vote-splitting seems to be more prevalent on the left than on the right, surely everyone on the left should be in favour of it?

This is where principled argument and hatred of the Lib Dems tend to blur into one.

Ugh. On close reflection, I feel that my estimate of the British Liberal Democratic Party’s ability to influence Steven Harper was overstated.

Of course the case of George Bush shows that unfortunately some (even a substantial part) of the electorate never learns – even from dramatic experiments.

This is literally the most gratuitous George Bush electoral reference ever.

OK, you’ve got me there.

Yes to PR! Yes to weekend voting! Yes to an elected House of Lords! Yes to compulsory voting only can we not use the actual word ‘compulsory’, it sounds sort of Bulgarian!

But today, the struggle. No to AV!

I’d love to hear your explanation for why having your govt selected by a biassed sample of the population is democratic

An election isn’t an exercise in sampling theory.

Yes it is, dsquared.

Let’s try another tack (I know you’ll love this): if you had AV, the Lib Dems would be able to take their time to build a real, solid electoral base without being (unduly) sleazy or opportunistic, because they could rely on preferences to shore up their vote as they slowly developed their reputation, etc. So in an alternate universe where AV had been implemented under Thatcher (hahahaha), the modern Lib Dems would be a principled party of the centre left. Led by someone other than Nick Clegg…

With respect to that particular comparison as well, it should be remarked that we are unlikely to make any major oil discoveries in the FPTP voting system – 1979 to 1997 marked the single most unlikely period in economic history since the Act of Union for Scottish independence.

I hate to be the one to break the news to you that Scotland’s oil money was stolen, possibly by the English.

248: yes, I know…

No I’m not, ajay. I’m well aware of the difference. Australia had 95% turnout in 2007, and a 4% informal vote casting rate. This has been mentioned above.

dsquared, you know full well that how you take a sample is not affected by how you measure that sample once taken. In fact, our voting system makes it perfectly possible to identify how things would have been different under proportional voting. In either case, the sample is representative of the population. The British sample is not, so it doesn’t matter how accurate your measurement system is, the result is still biassed.